Disturbing.
Chinese police have dismantled a network of traffickers of fake Covid-19 vaccines, arresting more than 80 suspects and seizing more than 3,000 syringes containing ... salt water, the national press reported on Tuesday.
According to the English-language daily Global Times, the counterfeiters "were considering possibly selling their vaccines abroad."
Trafficking had been rampant since September in Beijing and in two provinces in the east of the country, Shandong and Jiangsu, said the New China agency.
The police "destroyed the counterfeit laboratories, cut the commercial chains, arrested more than 80 suspects and seized more than 3,000 fake vaccines against Covid-19 on the spot", added the official press agency.
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New China did not say how many fake vaccines were sold or administered or how much the trafficking reported, only indicating that the fake doses were sold at "a high price."
The Global Times explains that the fake vaccines, filled with salt water, were harmless and caused no casualties, even though the “vaccinated” people had no protection against the coronavirus.
China, where the Covid-19 first appeared at the end of 2019, has invested a lot of money and energy in the production of vaccines, promising to make it "a global public good".
For the time being, only one vaccine, developed by the Sinopharm laboratory, has been officially approved by the health authorities at the end of December.
China on the alert
But Beijing had started last summer to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of people considered "at risk", including diplomats and students leaving for abroad.
With the approach of the Chinese New Year (February 12) which usually gives rise to hundreds of millions of displacements, the authorities have undertaken to massively vaccinate the population.
Until January 26, nearly 23 million doses have already been administered in the country of 1.4 billion inhabitants, announced the Ministry of Health.
Since the start of the pandemic, thousands of people have been prosecuted in China for various crimes, ranging from "spreading rumors" to hiding their contamination through refusal to comply with epidemic prevention measures.
China has all but eradicated the disease from its soil, although limited outbreaks of epidemics were seen last month.
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VIDEO. Covid-19: China fights against an upsurge in cases
The country is no stranger to scandals involving vaccines.
In 2018, the pharmaceutical company Changsheng Bio-technology was fined one billion euros for selling defective doses.